Modeling Project Structure

The Modeling project currently comprises a set of so called container projects that in turn contain the various projects that act as hosts for actual modeling technologies. This nested project structure is reflected in the Eclipse Foundation's tree-based overview of the Modeling project. With a two exceptions, i.e., Amalgamation and Agent Modeling Platform, the direct subprojects of the Modeling project don't directly host source-code repositories, but rather act as a mechanism for grouping and managing closely related projects. Each container project does however host a web-related artifact repository and as such each container project has a set of committers that must be managed via elections according to the Eclipse Development Process. It has proven to be inconvenient to manage the set of committers on container projects independently of the union of the set of committers on each of the contained projects.

Another problem with the container-project structure is that provides little value for the end-consumers of Eclipse's modeling technologies. The bewildering collection of Modeling projects are difficult to navigate and the website generally does a poor job helping the end consumer. Adding yet more projects to this mix, i.e., projects that directly contain solutions for nothing, only adds to this complexity. Ultimately the end consumers don't care about project structure at all, they're looking for practical solutions to real-world problems. They need a website organized according to their needs and interests, not one that's organized according to our internal project structure.

As part of a major overhaul of the Modeling project's web presence, we plan to eliminate all the container projects as outlined below.

Over the past years, we've had a very liberal policy for hosting new Modeling projects. On the plus side, that policy has lead to the rapid growth of the Modeling project. On the negative side, it's increased the burden for end consumers who must navigate a bewildering collection of projects. Compound that with the fact that we've done a very poor job of pruning the failed projects and keeping the web presence up-to-date and modern and you end up with something that reflects very poorly on the mature, well-supported, best-of-breed technologies hosted within the Modeling project. To address this problem, we plan to terminate and archive all the projects that have failed to remain significantly active over the past years as outlined below.

Container Projects to be Collapsed

The following Modeling projects will be collapsed, moving their subprojects up one level to be direct children of the Modeling project. We'll need to think carefully about how to host replacement web pages or how to provide redirects to modernized replacement pages.

The eclipse.tools.emf forum will be preserved. It will generally be shared by the subprojects currently contained by EMF; unfortunately the qualified forum name reflects EMF's historical roots as part of the Eclipse Tools projects. The Eclipse Foundation is unable to migrate a forum to use a new name so starting a new forum loses the history for the old one which is unacceptable for a project with 10 years of history.

The emf-dev mailing list will be preserved. It will generally be shared by the subprojects currently contained by EMF.

GEMS bridges the gap between the communities experienced with visual metamodeling tools, such as the Generic Modeling Environment (GME), and those built around the Eclipse modeling technologies, such as the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF) and Graphical Modeling Framework (GMF). The project is a subproject of the GMT project. The project has been inactive for years.

JCRM combines the strength of the Eclipse modeling projects with the scalability, features and exchangeability of the JCR repositories. The project is a subproject of the EMFT project. The project has been inactive for years.

SDO is an implementation of the Service Data Objects specification. The project was a component of the EMF project. Support for it was terminated as the 2.5 release of EMF. At that time, it was taken over by the Apache Tuscany project.

Servus allow developers to design and evolve Web Services (WS) using Ecore based models, by providing mappings between those models and Web Services artifacts, such as WSDL descriptions, WS client stubs and WS server skeletons. The project is a subproject of the EMFT project. The project has been inactive for many years.

TCS enables the specification of textual concrete syntaxes for Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) by attaching syntactic information to metamodels. The project is a subproject of the to-be-terminated TMF project.

Activities:

TCS isn't mentioned on the TMF landing page.

Archive the contents of the repository that I've been unable to locate because there is no metadata for this project.

UML2 Tools is a set of GMF-based editors for viewing and editing UML models. The project is a subproject of the to-be-terminated MDT project. It's contents will be migrated as samples for the GMF project.